Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
by Mikhail Tarkovsky
[REGNUM] It is always with delight and admiration that you discover people who do something selflessly and for the sake of the future. Their life, their example is the natural Russian asceticism of our time.
The essence of this movement, although not massive, but stubbornly existing, is that everyone takes on their own shoulders a feasible part of the work, working on their small Motherland, and from such scraps of creation the huge fabric of modern Russia is formed.
People obsessed with love for their native land and the idea of preserving traditions - craftsmanship, spiritual and moral, military (although one does not exist without the other) - without waiting for a command, they themselves bring their wonderful ideas to life.
VILLAGE ON THE YENISEI
There is a small settlement Bakhta in the north of Krasnoyarsk Krai, in the huge taiga region of Turukhansk. On the bank of the Yenisei. There are a little over two hundred people. It was founded more than 400 years ago.
As usual, Bakhta was first just a winter hut, then a handful of huts, then it grew... It stands beautifully, as is customary in Siberia, at the mouth of a river. The river is magnificent - 500 miles of transparent Evenk water among the hills.
As for the name, there are only guesses. There are many names for "Bakhta" in Russia - in the south of our region, in the Kemerovo region, and in the Urals... In Vladimir Ivanovich Dal's dictionary, the word "bakhta" is defined as "Asian printed fabric", so the first thing that comes to mind is the Turkic origin of the name.
But in the Yenisei north there are no Turkic names - they are all in the south of Siberia.
In the taiga north - Selkups, Kets and Evenks. Therefore, there is also a Ket version of the origin of the word Bakhta. Bok tes : Bok - fire. Tes (tes', ses') - river. It seems like it's burnt... Maybe from forest fires? There is also a Ket word "deng" - translated as "people", "family". Boktedeng - people, family from "burnt", from the Gorela River... For example: Kasdeng, people from Kasa, Elukdeng - people from Eloguy (such a river).
Maybe Boktedeng or Bokteng really turned into Bakhta? One can only guess. When our ancestors came to Siberia, they often transformed local names, altered them in their own way. One of our hunters transformed the Evenki name of the river Yadokta into Yagodka. Or, for example, Ergene - in Evenki "winding river", our Transbaikal Cossacks turned it into Argun.
The village is small but significant. In the midst of deserted spaces, even one person - as if it seems larger, grows to a phenomenon, an event. As the neighbor said: "Some kind of concentration!" You can feel the elbow of this neighbor three hundred miles away. Therefore, the village has many things necessary for life - a kindergarten, a museum, a temple, a full school.
TELEPHONE TOWER.
And in the year of Viktor Astafyev's centenary, an initiative arose to organize a two-month School of Painting here, on the basis of the secondary school. The V. P. Astafyev Charitable Foundation was engaged in this, and financial support was provided by the Charitable Foundation for the Preservation of Ecological Systems of Siberia and the Far East. They invited a real artist - a member of the Union of Artists of the Russian Federation Dmitry Plokhikh, who taught schoolchildren (and anyone else interested) the basics of painting.
I won't bother the reader with the program of classes, but I will say the main thing: there was no plan to make artists out of everyone - the task was to teach children to think artistically, to feel aesthetically and, of course, to try to discover, to see through painting the beauty of their native place. And, of course, to reread Astafyev.
With all the academic breadth of the program (drawing, modeling, oil painting), it was precisely the work with oil paints that rose up and reigned over everything, and this turned out to be an absolute miracle: painting in children's little hands is unusually luminous - what is the mystery of mixing paints worth alone! Or light in painting...
The vast world is the life of this light, the particularities of how it fills the surrounding objects with meaning, mood, intonation - no matter what they are - logs, bare larches, the distant Yenisei Ugor in the gray haze. The secret of conveying light and color, turning them into elements of a painting - all this turned out to be such an endless and fascinating matter that even some adult participants of the School left it completely "sick" with painting.
Taking on this hitherto unknown enterprise, we did not know how much it would captivate and interest us - perhaps after the very first lesson no one would want to go. But it was not so. Both children and adults went in almost their entire numbers - and this despite the rather serious workload at the school in general.
ASTAFIEV AND CHILDREN
Since the program began in the year of Viktor Petrovich Astafyev's centenary, the theme of the School of Painting became images from the works of this writer (and our amazing fellow countryman), a true ascetic and educator. And there was another sub-idea in this idea: to show the kinship of the arts, their great contiguity, which Astafyev felt like no one else - let's remember his holy, enthusiastic attitude to music and painting, his heightened sense of nature.
And, of course, the child’s soul from a distant village, so thirsty for beauty, glorified by the writer.
And let us remember ourselves in childhood, when painting or music was revealed through literature and vice versa, and how in this interweaving of births a lifelong impression arose. How this crossroad was filled with a special glow: to feel through Astafyev the composer Sviridov or the conductor Kolobov, through Bunin - Gogol, through Pushkin - Pugachev, Razin - through Shukshin...
I will never forget the heartbeat I felt when I first watched Kalina Krasnaya and in the pre-finale the prisoner sang a song based on Yesenin's poems. This episode struck me so much that for a long time it seemed as if the film began with that song. And the names of Shukshin and Yesenin forever entered my heart as a bright and sorrowful alloy.
Astafyev, with his passionate passion for music and painting, lived a difficult and tragic childhood and wrote a lot about orphanhood - both in the human kingdom, and in the animal kingdom, and in the bird kingdom. He grieved for his drowned mother, for the lost boy in the white shirt, for ruined nests, for snatched babies, for birds and animals that died for various reasons. And he was never afraid - ah! - to traumatize the child reader as if by cruelty - wounded himself from childhood, he carried his wound like a vaccination...
He didn't take care of himself or us.
The artistic image of the kapalukha (wood grouse, female wood grouse), which sometimes rushes about, leading the children away from the nest, and then sits amazingly steadfastly on the nest when a tractor passes over it, became a symbol of the mother's share and responsibility in several of his stories. This image of a mother bird - sometimes touching, sometimes powerful - is the theme of many of his works.
And so, in our School of Painting, we painted this very kapalukha. Adults, children, and hunters painted it, knowing this bird well, so inconspicuous in appearance, unlike the handsome wood grouse - its entire coloring seemed to be created in order to dissolve in the forest and grasses and mosses, to make this mother bird ( "mother bird and dragonfly" ) as invisible as possible.
But how detailed and beautiful are its speckles! Eyes, spots and sabres on ochre. Black on red... What extraordinary beauty in this variegation, in these filigree brackets on a strong field - as if before us is not a feather, but something cast and dense. Such perfection also occurs... in the skies... In light clouds... Thoughtful feathery ripples on the slope of the day in early autumn. Thus the earthly is reflected in the heavenly...
Of course, he tried, the master artist helped, and the brushes worked, and the children's eyes squinted. And the canvas was covered with paints. The mother-kapalukha came to life in the unbearable detail and complexity of the drawing, the long neck stretched out, and now a wary and curious brown eye was shining, a red eyebrow with a bright cranberry arch colored the picture...
And the child himself froze in amazement - how does an image emerge from a mess of colors?! Truly, "the will and labor of man create wondrous wonders!" And his own, close, forest-like - intertwined with great literature.
WE CANCEL THE CLASSICS
Once, one lady from the "cultural" and literary circles, who always takes interviews, gave a fantastic speech in one of her programs. About books and the Soviet era. She even started encouragingly: like, that's how we were, reading and bookish, and so it's right and good. But suddenly (don't fall!): it turns out that all this was forced !
This is from wretchedness and totalitarianism. A lousy life. Like, in bad (!) times you'll grab at any straw, you'll read under the blanket with a flashlight. Because in normal times, reading is not such an important thing. It goes through a comma, on par with everything else. An artist's testimony about his time - what is it for! In "free" eras, there are more interesting things. By normal eras, apparently, they mean times when a child can barely cope with the information trash and impositions like market morality that have fallen on him.
It turns out that the state of hermitage, spiritual autonomy, necessary for a thinking person, which is so valuable at any time and without which a real immersion in culture and history is impossible, is now called a mistake and a disaster. Poor Soviet intellectuals - how unlucky they were to have read so much!
Let's now deal with the impositions. The main one is from the area of overthrow: Pushkin is great, but now is a different time. The effect of that living water has ended. Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky - they are, of course, great - who argues! As well as Rasputin, Shukshin, Astafyev... But, as you understand, now everything is different. Therefore - under the hood! We will wipe the dust, receive money for storage, but we will not open the hood. We will not let you breathe the air alone.
At one time they suggested throwing everyone "over the ship of modernity", they suggested, they shouted, but in schools they studied "War and Peace"! And "The Captain's Daughter". Our "cultured lady", however, will say that it was for the sake of Pugachev's rebellion against autocracy. It may be "for the sake of", but they learned honor, courage and compassion. And now they have thrown everyone over the ship for real: culture must serve the market.
HONEST VILLAGE
Actually, the dispute is about time and the soul. For some in Russia, time is different, but for us it is always the same. That is why some say: "Astafyev wrote about this and that"... And we say - "writes". Astafyev writes about the village, about nature. They will immediately label him - a villager. They say that time has passed, there is no more village literature. And there is no literature about nature either. I wonder: there is a village, there is nature, but there is no literature? Dead. The topic is closed by a new culture, but the phenomenon remains. So who is dead?
By the way, I never liked the word "village dwellers". I imagined some old man from city dwellers' films about the village... Sitting on a bench with a cigarette... Honestly, the term somehow narrows, reduces the scale, stuffs the great into genre, into some specialty... Instead of cosmic... When both the way of life, and nature, and the stars, and calluses on the hands.
Just before the School of Painting, they held a regional competition, "Astafyev and Nature", junior schoolchildren wrote essays, middle and senior schoolchildren wrote essays and research papers. So all the best, all the honest works were from children from villages. Not quite so, of course: city dwellers, especially seniors, have many good works, but there are also many like the one from the girl from the second grade: "The concept of Astafyev's village prose consists in...". It consists in blowing from "sources" on daddy's computer!
And it turns out that the villagers, the backward ones, thought for themselves. So where is there more culture?
Therefore, we will study Shishkin and Surikov, read Belov and Shukshin, and draw a kapalukha. We will follow the example of those who build museums, work with children, give their lives for the future, and not for profit. After all, profit has no homeland, knows no past, and knows no future. It has no audacity of selflessness. And it believes in nothing.
And we believe.
And the creators of folk museums in Yeniseysk (the plane museum and the horse culture museum) and Turukhansk (the museum of spiritual culture of the Yenisey north). And Yuri Mikhailov, who created a birch bark culture museum and a beauty museum in Mariinsk (Kuzbass). And Nikolay Aleksandrov, a writer and publisher from Novosibirsk, who created a whole set of programs on spiritual, moral and patriotic education - and achieved the implementation of these programs in educational institutions of the region.
We believe that it is impossible to recode Russian music, Russian painting, Russian literature. The great Russian culture: deep, integral and highly spiritual. Which, like a high wind, saturated with mountain air, carries layers of oxygen from the past to the future.
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